Comment by Turskarama | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Turskarama | Hacker News Reader

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> - The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.

I see this argument come up a lot with regards to all kinds of infrastructure, and the thing is it simply _isn't true_.

What matters is population density, GDP per capita, geography, and will. A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal, also give you twice the workforce to make it happen. In fact the only change a larger area typically makes is better ability to make use of economies of scale, which makes things _easier_.

The only correlation between larger countries and trouble with infrastructure is that a large country is more likely to have large areas with nearly nobody in them, but these areas also typically account for a vanishingly small percentage of the population so they don't really count when people are talking about bad infrastructure.

Population density is the thing people are talking about when they say that. It's 6 times higher in Switzerland than in the US.

Density is not the correct measure here because empty land decreases density but doesn't need to be covered. What matters is how much the population is clustered.

But that makes it even worse because a lot of Switzerland is entirely unoccupied mountains whereas millions of people live in places like Kansas and Nebraska and expect to have internet access.

And they do have it, but it does not need to be 25 gbps. Even if they had access to it, they wouldn't/shouldn't pay for it.

Which of the things you said don't also apply to the people in Zurich?

Also, if you say people in Kansas don't need fiber then you have to expect that to get averaged in. The population density in California is less than half what it is in Switzerland. Only 10% of US states have a higher population density than Switzerland and those states represent less than 10% of the US population (because of those 5 states the one with the largest land area is Maryland).

25 Gbps is a silly (but illustrative / clickbaity) take in this context. The more relevant measures as others have pointed out is how well-covered clusters of population are, but also what their broadband quality is. I live in Sweden, where we have extremely well-built out broadband networks, especially in cities. (My professional take is that quality is often very poor, but that is comparing to the rest of the country). We are a small country too, but we have still chosen symmetric active ethernet over the assymmetric PON, we have largely discontinued DSL, our cable/coax offerings have largely been replaced with fibre, and where DSL was not profitable, 4G is generally built out well enough to cover most people. Swedes in rural areas buy Starlink not for their reach, but for redundancy or even price.

I would say most of those things are not true in the US market. The united states IS a much, much bigger country, but my guess is that the median reach, stability, and speed is way lower than the Swedish and Swiss examples, compared to what it could be. The US has way higher military costs, still relatively high taxes, and most of all a stronger buying power. I pay $35/month for 300/300 Mbps Active Ethernet FTTH, and consider that overprized. When I last looked, the median American could generally afford more than that, but had access to less. Sorry, I don't have the numbers at hand.

My 8mbps DSL line is $43USD/month after everything, and the cheapest internet I have access to.

The next tier up is Starlink or 250mbps Fiber, which have the same cost. I do not wish to support Starlink. But I also can't afford to almost double my internet bill.

I live on a major national highway in a crossroads town.

If the least populated 3% of Switzerland's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, no one would care because it's just a single frozen mountain.

If the least populated 3% of the USA's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, people would care because it's the entire state of Wyoming. Okay, most people wouldn't care, but some people in Wyoming would.

That seems like another way to lie with silly stats though. If 3% of the least populated areas of all the subdivisions of the US the size of Switzerland were not connected, then that would indeed be just as irrelevant.

> A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal

It will never be both objectively and subjectively equal. Even the geographic is already difference, the weather, then there is people, wealth, etc.

Yes but all of those things are independent of the size of the country, which is the point.

Wrong, there are scaling problems. Have you ever worked at both a very large and very small company? Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?

So why don't you have ISPs that focus on one state or one geographical area. We have that all over in Europe.

To some extent there are, but in many cases it's because the law prohibits that. It imposes build out requirements so that if you want to offer service in the higher density area you also have to provide service over a wide area that includes a bunch of farmland or similar.

In theory this is supposed to be to make sure someone is serving rural areas but in practice it's because the incumbents don't want new challengers showing up to provide better service in the areas where it's profitable to build a competing network and so lobby the government to saddle them with a huge barrier to entry.

They get bought out.

The wonderful Minneapolis-local fiber ISP US Internet recently got bought out by T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom) for example.

Wave Broadband in the bay area got bought by private equity.

All around the country you'll find local or municipal cable companies that got sold to the big players, Mediacom, Comcast, etc.

It's a false equivalence to compare working in a company to have the same scaling problems as implementing policies to set up broadband infrastructure.

Not really at all.

Taking politics out of it. If you wanted to start a 25gbps project today, who do you think could get it done quicker. A small local municipality with a few network engineers. Or getting a Federal agency to do it?

My money is on the municipality.

I agree that a smaller municipality would be more successful, but not because they are smaller.

The municipality is a more concentrated interest, and more motivated to deliver on a solution that works for their constituents.

Compare that to the federal government needing to execute a national “Interstate Highway for broadband” mega-project. The federal government can and has executed these kinds of projects, but it needs to consider different things than the municipalities.

Extending the highway metaphor, a smaller municipality can pave local roads just as quickly as the federal government can build highways.

Efficiency is not a perfect function of government size.

Indeed. But also some things that were harder at the small company were easier at the large one. You have processes in place, were things in the small company are all done ‘by hand’.

So I think it is hard to compare small and big. For one company things are easy that are hard for the other and vice-versa.

Do you imagine an infrastructure project in ANY country is managed like a project in a small company?

> Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?

I don't know about anyone else, but I have *never* found this to be the case.

Dealing with a larger company you've got a far greater selection of people you can get to say "uh, yeah, I guess, why not? It's not really my department..." which you can take as a yes.

In a smaller company no matter what you're doing you've got to get it past Old Bob, who's been there since before most of the current management team were born and will argue over everything simply because he can.

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